We made two very conscious decisions in our redesign that we believe are in the best interests of our readers. First, we decided that we should not open new browser windows. New windows are confusing on mobile devices and often annoying in desktop browsers. New windows, even if they open as new tabs, are first cousins to pop-ups and nobody likes those.
The second decision was that we scaled back our sharing tools to be simple and javascript-free. Clicking one of the share icons takes you out of our site and to another site, maybe Twitter or LinkedIn, where that site prompts you to complete the share. This makes our pages load faster, and offers our readers more privacy and security than using the more common Javascript sharing tools.
Together, however, the two decisions pose an unfortunate challenge: Twitter and Facebook both return readers back to our site after completing the share, but LinkedIn and Google both leave readers stranded with no visible path back to our site except the back button.
So we’re wondering: is it better for our readers for us to open a new window for sharing in those sites, knowing that doing so would break the back button, or is the back button enough?
As an extra, here are the docs on how to construct URLs to share on the social network sites we used:
Much as I liked the popup new window for those buttons, I think given our focus on mobile that re-using the same window makes sense — and so the least bad option seems to be leaving the LinkedIn and Google buttons the way they are, and relying on people to use the back button.